Teixeira Júnior challenges ministerial silence on emancipation

The Council of State considered a draft prepared by a commission drawing on Pimenta Bueno’s proposals and Nabuco de Araújo’s legal work. The question was how the imperial state would manage the end of...

Council of State deliberations continued over a proposal that would break the inherited rule that a child followed the enslaved status of the mother. That principle made enslaved women’s...

In a further session on the emancipation project, councillors confronted whether children born to enslaved women could be treated as free without compensating owners. The dispute exposed slavery’s...

Council members continued examining the draft that later informed the Free Womb proposal. The reform’s design tried to reconcile a claimed future of freedom with the protection of property and labor...

Decree no. 1,695 of 15 September 1869 prohibited selling enslaved people at public auction with a public cry and exhibition. The rule curtailed one degrading public practice but did not ban private...

On 12 May 1871, the government’s proposal on the “servile element” entered the Senate’s legislative process. The bill proposed that children born to enslaved women after enactment be declared free,...

The parliamentary record identifies sessions on 23 and 24 May as part of the Chamber’s renewed discussion of emancipation. The proposed change questioned the legal inheritance of enslaved status,...

Debate continued over a measure that would declare future-born children free while allowing owners to retain their services through adolescence. The issue was not an abstract legal puzzle: it...

On 30 June 1871, a Senate commission issued a report on the government’s proposal concerning the “servile element.” Committee work translated abolitionist pressure and imperial political calculation...

The parliamentary annals for this session record discussion of the proposed reform and its terms. The state’s approach promised that slavery would end in the future, but the future-born children could...